Adventures in Nail Polish and a Little Bit of Beauty

Julep Felicia, Emerson, and Kimberly

I don’t always do a mani for every holiday, but I really wanted to use something cheerful and springy for Easter. It was a long and busy week last week, so I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything elaborate. I decided the speckled polishes would be a perfect option, especially given how much time I spent trying to find Felicia.

Felicia is a black speckled mint crème that was offered as an add-on to the April 2014 Collection. I’m not sure if it was ever offered again, as it is fairly rare and can be very hard to find. Emerson, a black speckled powder blue crème, and Kimberly, a black speckled wisteria crème, were offered in the April 2014 Speckled for Spring Mystery Box. They are not common, but both pop up more often than Felicia.

Speckled, hot mess. But I’m glad I gave it a shot.

Initially I wanted to try sponging the polishes to create a green-blue gradient on my pointer finger, and a blue-purple gradient on my ring finger. Then I planned to paint my thumb, middle, and pinky fingers with green, blue, and purple, respectively. However, it turns out that when you try to sponge with these polishes, all of the speckles stick to your nail, and all of the pigment stays on the sponge. Ooops. As a result, I decided to just paint each nail a plain color. It’s not the most sophisticated design, but that’s okay.

All three polishes went on well and were very easy to work with. The formula is not thick, but it did seem to have a longer than average dry time. Both Emerson and Kimberly needed three coats to achieve full coverage and good color saturation. With less coats, the color can be pretty pale. Felicia is more highly pigmented, and only requires two coats. However, I ended up using three coats just for balance. I topped it with Oxygen Performance Top Coat.

Despite having used three coats of polish, which I would think would make my nails more prone to chipping, I got very good wear out of this mani. I didn’t chip it until the third day. I really loved the speckled look, and wish there were more of them. This mani brightened my day, and I was quite pleased with the fun, springy colors. I’ll definitely be using them again in the future.

I had high hopes that Felicia and friends might be back from the vault for the March Collection or the March Mystery Box, but sadly, there was not a back from the vault color this month. There was also not a mystery box this month, but I wouldn’t mind if they stopped doing mystery boxes, since I always end up with a bunch of dupes I need to destash. I hope they do bring the speckled colors back in the future, because people are always looking for them, and it’s a great, unique look. Hopefully they will release three more in a pastel yellow, pastel orange, and pastel pink as well to make it a full collection. One can dream…